What are your default beacon settings?

All of our BKON brand beacons that we ship are configured to broadcast an Eddystone-URL frame type which is used by the Physical Web. The default beacon mode setting is Eddystone-URL (non-connectable) for your security. The default advertising interval is 700 milliseconds which means your beacon "shouts" it's URL every 700 milliseconds. The default tx power for our BKON beacons is -12 dBm (decibel milliwatts) which correlates to roughly ~35 meters of broadcasting range.

There are a lot of factors that go into a beacons range including chipset and environmental variables like metal objects and concrete walls as well as device orientation which all may affect the broadcasting range but roughly we see around ~35 meters of broadcasting range at our -12 dBm.

*We offer platform level range control so that you don't need to ever need to pair with you beacon unless you really want to.

If you wish to change any of these default settings then you will need the BKON Connect Configuration app (iOS / Android) and there is more info on how to use that in the tutorials section.

If you're really interested in learning more about ranging and beacons then continue reading -

0 dBm correlates to 1 milliwatt of power in the radio chip and the ratio of dBm to milliwatts equates so that for each 3 dB decrease in level, the power is reduced by about one-half, making −3 dBm correspond to a power of about 0.5 mW.

The formula for converting dBm to milliwatts is:

x = you beacons dBm

y = mW (an abbreviation for milliwatts)

y = 1 mW * 10^(x/10)

So to find the default broadcasting power in milliwatts at our -12 dBm default setting, you would perform the following:

.0631 = 1mW*10^(-12/10)

which gives us a result of .0631 mW of power consumption at our default tx power setting. This does not directly correlate to distance because of device specification which is not publically available by Apple as it's hidden behind their CoreLocation API and different libraries for Android have different ways they calculate RSSI (received signal strength indicator) for Bluetooth capable devices.

Beacons broadcast at 2.4 GHz and to learn more about Bluetooth and signal strength, check out the links below.